Welcome to ‘contrarian Monday,’ Apple fans

“Philip Elmer-DeWitt and Harry McCracken authored a couple of great posts chronicling the bizarre way in which Apple rumors routinely get transmogrified into “OH MY STARS, DID YOU SEE THIS?” headlines,” Charles Cooper reports for CNET. “My only beef is that they got down to writing this before I did.”

For years, Digitimes has been a high-profile rumormonger when it comes to upcoming Apple products, usually crediting its gossip to the Asian component makers who supply Apple with bits and pieces of technology. (The publication says, for instance, that ‘sources from the upstream supply chain’ told it about the $799 Air.) Its stories get covered widely — sometimes by writers who pause to express a certain degree of doubt, and sometimes by ones who don’t.

But the thing is, Digitimes isn’t just wrong some of the time. When it comes to the big Apple stories, it’s wrong most of the time. Sometimes wildly so. It’s reported that its sources had said that Apple was going to release MacBooks with AMD processors, iMacs with touch screens, iPhones with built-in projectors and iPads with OLED displays. Those products, and others mentioned in Digitimes articles, never showed up. – Harry McCracken

If Gou really said this, it would be — for all the reasons stated above — very big news. So how is it that none of the other reporters covering the event heard it? Not Reuters’ John Ruwitch. Not Bloomberg’s Tim Culpin. Not the AP’s Elaine Kurtenbach. It is possible that the China Daily reporter misheard or misunderstood Gou’s remarks? Or that his report was mistranslated? Or that a desk editor or rewrite person mangled it? – Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Maybe “upstream component suppliers” were asked to make some prototype Macs with AMD components, etc, but those were for testing. That gets blown-up into, “Apple is switching to AMD!,” but those never made it into a shipping product.